The widespread adoption of cloud-based proprietary large language models (LLMs) has introduced significant challenges, including operational dependencies, privacy concerns, and the necessity of continuous internet connectivity. In this work, we introduce an LLMOps pipeline, "LlamaDuo", for the seamless migration of knowledge and abilities from service-oriented LLMs to smaller, locally manageable models. This pipeline is crucial for ensuring service continuity in the presence of operational failures, strict privacy policies, or offline requirements. Our LlamaDuo involves fine-tuning a small language model against the service LLM using a synthetic dataset generated by the latter. If the performance of the fine-tuned model falls short of expectations, it is automatically improved through additional fine-tuning using extra similar data generated by the service LLM. This multi-turn process guarantees that the smaller model can eventually match or even surpass the service LLM's capabilities in specific downstream tasks, offering a practical and scalable solution for managing AI deployments in constrained environments. Extensive experiments with leading-edge LLMs are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness, adaptability, and affordability of LlamaDuo across various downstream tasks. Our pipeline implementation is available at https://github.com/deep-diver/llamaduo.
We explore social perception of human faces in CLIP, a widely used open-source vision-language model. To this end, we compare the similarity in CLIP embeddings between different textual prompts and a set of face images. Our textual prompts are constructed from well-validated social psychology terms denoting social perception. The face images are synthetic and are systematically and independently varied along six dimensions: the legally protected attributes of age, gender, and race, as well as facial expression, lighting, and pose. Independently and systematically manipulating face attributes allows us to study the effect of each on social perception and avoids confounds that can occur in wild-collected data due to uncontrolled systematic correlations between attributes. Thus, our findings are experimental rather than observational. Our main findings are three. First, while CLIP is trained on the widest variety of images and texts, it is able to make fine-grained human-like social judgments on face images. Second, age, gender, and race do systematically impact CLIP's social perception of faces, suggesting an undesirable bias in CLIP vis-a-vis legally protected attributes. Most strikingly, we find a strong pattern of bias concerning the faces of Black women, where CLIP produces extreme values of social perception across different ages and facial expressions. Third, facial expression impacts social perception more than age and lighting as much as age. The last finding predicts that studies that do not control for unprotected visual attributes may reach the wrong conclusions on bias. Our novel method of investigation, which is founded on the social psychology literature and on the experiments involving the manipulation of individual attributes, yields sharper and more reliable observations than previous observational methods and may be applied to study biases in any vision-language model.
Human mobility prediction is essential for applications like urban planning and transportation management, yet it remains challenging due to the complex, often implicit, intentions behind human behavior. Existing models predominantly focus on spatiotemporal patterns, paying less attention to the underlying intentions that govern movements. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative research angle for integrating commonsense reasoning into mobility prediction. However, it is a non-trivial problem because LLMs are not natively built for mobility intention inference, and they also face scalability issues and integration difficulties with spatiotemporal models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel LIMP (LLMs for Intent-ware Mobility Prediction) framework. Specifically, LIMP introduces an "Analyze-Abstract-Infer" (A2I) agentic workflow to unleash LLM's commonsense reasoning power for mobility intention inference. Besides, we design an efficient fine-tuning scheme to transfer reasoning power from commercial LLM to smaller-scale, open-source language model, ensuring LIMP's scalability to millions of mobility records. Moreover, we propose a transformer-based intention-aware mobility prediction model to effectively harness the intention inference ability of LLM. Evaluated on two real-world datasets, LIMP significantly outperforms baseline models, demonstrating improved accuracy in next-location prediction and effective intention inference. The interpretability of intention-aware mobility prediction highlights our LIMP framework's potential for real-world applications. Codes and data can be found in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/LIMP .
Existing vehicle detectors are usually obtained by training a typical detector (e.g., YOLO, RCNN, DETR series) on vehicle images based on a pre-trained backbone (e.g., ResNet, ViT). Some researchers also exploit and enhance the detection performance using pre-trained large foundation models. However, we think these detectors may only get sub-optimal results because the large models they use are not specifically designed for vehicles. In addition, their results heavily rely on visual features, and seldom of they consider the alignment between the vehicle's semantic information and visual representations. In this work, we propose a new vehicle detection paradigm based on a pre-trained foundation vehicle model (VehicleMAE) and a large language model (T5), termed VFM-Det. It follows the region proposal-based detection framework and the features of each proposal can be enhanced using VehicleMAE. More importantly, we propose a new VAtt2Vec module that predicts the vehicle semantic attributes of these proposals and transforms them into feature vectors to enhance the vision features via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on three vehicle detection benchmark datasets thoroughly proved the effectiveness of our vehicle detector. Specifically, our model improves the baseline approach by $+5.1\%$, $+6.2\%$ on the $AP_{0.5}$, $AP_{0.75}$ metrics, respectively, on the Cityscapes dataset.The source code of this work will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/VFM-Det.
In the field of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), common methods typically involve unfreezing the language model during training to foster profound visual understanding. However, the fine-tuning of such models with vision-language data often leads to a diminution of their natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. To avoid this performance degradation, a straightforward solution is to freeze the language model while developing multimodal competencies. Unfortunately, previous works have not attained satisfactory outcomes. Building on the strategy of freezing the language model, we conduct thorough structural exploration and introduce the Inner-Adaptor Architecture (IAA). Specifically, the architecture incorporates multiple multimodal adaptors at varying depths within the large language model to facilitate direct interaction with the inherently text-oriented transformer layers, thereby enabling the frozen language model to acquire multimodal capabilities. Unlike previous approaches of freezing language models that require large-scale aligned data, our proposed architecture is able to achieve superior performance on small-scale datasets. We conduct extensive experiments to improve the general multimodal capabilities and visual grounding abilities of the MLLM. Our approach remarkably outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across various vision-language benchmarks without sacrificing performance on NLP tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/Inner-Adaptor-Architecture.
Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable but face latency challenges in real-time applications, such as conducting online hallucination detection. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages a small language model (SLM) classifier for initial detection, followed by a LLM as constrained reasoner to generate detailed explanations for detected hallucinated content. This study optimizes the real-time interpretable hallucination detection by introducing effective prompting techniques that align LLM-generated explanations with SLM decisions. Empirical experiment results demonstrate its effectiveness, thereby enhancing the overall user experience.
Recent surge in Large Language Model (LLM) availability has opened exciting avenues for research. However, efficiently interacting with these models presents a significant hurdle since LLMs often reside on proprietary or self-hosted API endpoints, each requiring custom code for interaction. Conducting comparative studies between different models can therefore be time-consuming and necessitate significant engineering effort, hindering research efficiency and reproducibility. To address these challenges, we present prompto, an open source Python library which facilitates asynchronous querying of LLM endpoints enabling researchers to interact with multiple LLMs concurrently, while maximising efficiency and utilising individual rate limits. Our library empowers researchers and developers to interact with LLMs more effectively and allowing faster experimentation, data generation and evaluation. prompto is released with an introductory video (https://youtu.be/lWN9hXBOLyQ) under MIT License and is available via GitHub (https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/prompto).
Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, leading to an expectation for LLMs to be trustworthy -- - both accurate and well-calibrated (the prediction confidence should align with its ground truth correctness likelihood). Nowadays, fine-tuning has become the most popular method for adapting a model to practical usage by significantly increasing accuracy on downstream tasks. Despite the great accuracy it achieves, we found fine-tuning is still far away from satisfactory trustworthiness due to "tuning-induced mis-calibration". In this paper, we delve deeply into why and how mis-calibration exists in fine-tuned models, and how distillation can alleviate the issue. Then we further propose a brand new method named Efficient Trustworthy Distillation (FIRST), which utilizes a small portion of teacher's knowledge to obtain a reliable language model in a cost-efficient way. Specifically, we identify the "concentrated knowledge" phenomenon during distillation, which can significantly reduce the computational burden. Then we apply a "trustworthy maximization" process to optimize the utilization of this small portion of concentrated knowledge before transferring it to the student. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where better accuracy (+2.3%) and less mis-calibration (-10%) are achieved on average across both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, indicating better trustworthiness.
Given the widespread dissemination of misinformation on social media, implementing fact-checking mechanisms for online claims is essential. Manually verifying every claim is very challenging, underscoring the need for an automated fact-checking system. This paper presents our system designed to address this issue. We utilize the Averitec dataset (Schlichtkrull et al., 2023) to assess the performance of our fact-checking system. In addition to veracity prediction, our system provides supporting evidence, which is extracted from the dataset. We develop a Retrieve and Generate (RAG) pipeline to extract relevant evidence sentences from a knowledge base, which are then inputted along with the claim into a large language model (LLM) for classification. We also evaluate the few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities of multiple LLMs. Our system achieves an 'Averitec' score of 0.33, which is a 22% absolute improvement over the baseline. Our Code is publicly available on https://github.com/ronit-singhal/evidence-backed-fact-checking-using-rag-and-few-shot-in-context-learning-with-llms.
The establishment of bioRxiv facilitated the rapid adoption of preprints in the life sciences, accelerating the dissemination of new research findings. However, the sheer volume of preprints published daily can be overwhelming, making it challenging for researchers to stay updated on the latest developments. Here, I introduce biorecap, an R package that retrieves and summarizes bioRxiv preprints using a large language model (LLM) running locally on nearly any commodity laptop. biorecap leverages the ollamar package to interface with the Ollama server and API endpoints, allowing users to prompt any local LLM available through Ollama. The package follows tidyverse conventions, enabling users to pipe the output of one function as input to another. Additionally, biorecap provides a single wrapper function that generates a timestamped CSV file and HTML report containing short summaries of recent preprints published in user-configurable subject areas. By combining the strengths of LLMs with the flexibility and security of local execution, biorecap represents an advancement in the tools available for managing the information overload in modern scientific research. The biorecap R package is available on GitHub at https://github.com/stephenturner/biorecap under an open-source (MIT) license.
Large Language Model (LLM) has demonstrated significant success in a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks within general domain. The emergence of LLM has introduced innovative methodologies across diverse fields, including the natural sciences. Researchers aim to implement automated, concurrent process driven by LLM to supplant conventional manual, repetitive and labor-intensive work. In the domain of spectral analysis and detection, it is imperative for researchers to autonomously acquire pertinent knowledge across various research objects, which encompasses the spectroscopic techniques and the chemometric methods that are employed in experiments and analysis. Paradoxically, despite the recognition of spectroscopic detection as an effective analytical method, the fundamental process of knowledge retrieval remains both time-intensive and repetitive. In response to this challenge, we first introduced the Spectral Detection and Analysis Based Paper(SDAAP) dataset, which is the first open-source textual knowledge dataset for spectral analysis and detection and contains annotated literature data as well as corresponding knowledge instruction data. Subsequently, we also designed an automated Q\&A framework based on the SDAAP dataset, which can retrieve relevant knowledge and generate high-quality responses by extracting entities in the input as retrieval parameters. It is worth noting that: within this framework, LLM is only used as a tool to provide generalizability, while RAG technique is used to accurately capture the source of the knowledge.This approach not only improves the quality of the generated responses, but also ensures the traceability of the knowledge. Experimental results show that our framework generates responses with more reliable expertise compared to the baseline.
Transferable neural architecture search (TNAS) has been introduced to design efficient neural architectures for multiple tasks, to enhance the practical applicability of NAS in real-world scenarios. In TNAS, architectural knowledge accumulated in previous search processes is reused to warm up the architecture search for new tasks. However, existing TNAS methods still search in an extensive search space, necessitating the evaluation of numerous architectures. To overcome this challenge, this work proposes a novel transfer paradigm, i.e., design principle transfer. In this work, the linguistic description of various structural components' effects on architectural performance is termed design principles. They are learned from established architectures and then can be reused to reduce the search space by discarding unpromising architectures. Searching in the refined search space can boost both the search performance and efficiency for new NAS tasks. To this end, a large language model (LLM)-assisted design principle transfer (LAPT) framework is devised. In LAPT, LLM is applied to automatically reason the design principles from a set of given architectures, and then a principle adaptation method is applied to refine these principles progressively based on the new search results. Experimental results show that LAPT can beat the state-of-the-art TNAS methods on most tasks and achieve comparable performance on others.
Despite the widespread adoption of autoregressive language models, explainability evaluation research has predominantly focused on span infilling and masked language models. Evaluating the faithfulness of an explanation method -- how accurately it explains the inner workings and decision-making of the model -- is challenging because it is difficult to separate the model from its explanation. Most faithfulness evaluation techniques corrupt or remove input tokens deemed important by a particular attribution (feature importance) method and observe the resulting change in the model's output. However, for autoregressive language models, this approach creates out-of-distribution inputs due to their next-token prediction training objective. In this study, we propose a technique that leverages counterfactual generation to evaluate the faithfulness of attribution methods for autoregressive language models. Our technique generates fluent, in-distribution counterfactuals, making the evaluation protocol more reliable.
Traditionally, reward models used for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) are trained to directly predict preference scores without leveraging the generation capabilities of the underlying large language model (LLM). This limits the capabilities of reward models as they must reason implicitly about the quality of a response, i.e., preference modeling must be performed in a single forward pass through the model. To enable reward models to reason explicitly about the quality of a response, we introduce Critique-out-Loud (CLoud) reward models. CLoud reward models operate by first generating a natural language critique of the assistant's response that is then used to predict a scalar reward for the quality of the response. We demonstrate the success of CLoud reward models for both Llama-3-8B and 70B base models: compared to classic reward models CLoud reward models improve pairwise preference classification accuracy on RewardBench by 4.65 and 5.84 percentage points for the 8B and 70B base models respectively. Furthermore, CLoud reward models lead to a Pareto improvement for win rate on ArenaHard when used as the scoring model for Best-of-N. Finally, we explore how to exploit the dynamic inference compute capabilities of CLoud reward models by performing self-consistency decoding for reward prediction.
Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) struggle with technical standards in telecommunications. We propose a fine-tuned retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system based on the Phi-2 small language model (SLM) to serve as an oracle for communication networks. Our developed system leverages forward-looking semantic chunking to adaptively determine parsing breakpoints based on embedding similarity, enabling effective processing of diverse document formats. To handle the challenge of multiple similar contexts in technical standards, we employ a re-ranking algorithm to prioritize the most relevant retrieved chunks. Recognizing the limitations of Phi-2's small context window, we implement a recent technique, namely SelfExtend, to expand the context window during inference, which not only boosts the performance but also can accommodate a wider range of user queries and design requirements from customers to specialized technicians. For fine-tuning, we utilize the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique to enhance computational efficiency during training and enable effective fine-tuning on small datasets. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over existing question-answering approaches in the telecom domain, achieving performance that exceeds larger language models such as GPT-4 (which is about 880 times larger in size). This work presents a novel approach to leveraging SLMs for communication networks, offering a balance of efficiency and performance. This work can serve as a foundation towards agentic language models for networks.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become a standard paradigm for weakly supervised classification of whole slide images (WSI). However, this paradigm relies on the use of a large number of labelled WSIs for training. The lack of training data and the presence of rare diseases present significant challenges for these methods. Prompt tuning combined with the pre-trained Vision-Language models (VLMs) is an effective solution to the Few-shot Weakly Supervised WSI classification (FSWC) tasks. Nevertheless, applying prompt tuning methods designed for natural images to WSIs presents three significant challenges: 1) These methods fail to fully leverage the prior knowledge from the VLM's text modality; 2) They overlook the essential multi-scale and contextual information in WSIs, leading to suboptimal results; and 3) They lack exploration of instance aggregation methods. To address these problems, we propose a Multi-Scale and Context-focused Prompt Tuning (MSCPT) method for FSWC tasks. Specifically, MSCPT employs the frozen large language model to generate pathological visual language prior knowledge at multi-scale, guiding hierarchical prompt tuning. Additionally, we design a graph prompt tuning module to learn essential contextual information within WSI, and finally, a non-parametric cross-guided instance aggregation module has been introduced to get the WSI-level features. Based on two VLMs, extensive experiments and visualizations on three datasets demonstrated the powerful performance of our MSCPT.
Understanding biological processes, drug development, and biotechnological advancements requires a detailed analysis of protein structures and functions, a task that is inherently complex and time-consuming in traditional protein research. To streamline this process, we introduce ProteinGPT, a state-of-the-art multimodal large language model for proteins that enables users to upload protein sequences and/or structures for comprehensive analysis and responsive inquiries. ProteinGPT integrates protein sequence and structure encoders with linear projection layers to ensure precise representation adaptation and leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate accurate, contextually relevant responses. To train ProteinGPT, we constructed a large-scale dataset of 132,092 proteins, each annotated with 20-30 property tags and 5-10 QA pairs per protein, and optimized the instruction-tuning process using GPT-4o. Experiments demonstrate that ProteinGPT effectively generates informative responses to protein-related questions, achieving high performance on both semantic and lexical metrics and significantly outperforming baseline models and general-purpose LLMs in understanding and responding to protein-related queries. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/ProteinGPT/ProteinGPT.
The fashion domain encompasses a variety of real-world multimodal tasks, including multimodal retrieval and multimodal generation. The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence generated content, particularly in technologies like large language models for text generation and diffusion models for visual generation, have sparked widespread research interest in applying these multimodal models in the fashion domain. However, tasks involving embeddings, such as image-to-text or text-to-image retrieval, have been largely overlooked from this perspective due to the diverse nature of the multimodal fashion domain. And current research on multi-task single models lack focus on image generation. In this work, we present UniFashion, a unified framework that simultaneously tackles the challenges of multimodal generation and retrieval tasks within the fashion domain, integrating image generation with retrieval tasks and text generation tasks. UniFashion unifies embedding and generative tasks by integrating a diffusion model and LLM, enabling controllable and high-fidelity generation. Our model significantly outperforms previous single-task state-of-the-art models across diverse fashion tasks, and can be readily adapted to manage complex vision-language tasks. This work demonstrates the potential learning synergy between multimodal generation and retrieval, offering a promising direction for future research in the fashion domain. The source code is available at https://github.com/xiangyu-mm/UniFashion.
$K$-nearest neighbor language models ($k$NN-LMs), which integrate retrieval with next-word prediction, have demonstrated strong performance in language modeling as well as downstream NLP benchmarks. These results have led researchers to argue that models trained on poor quality or outdated data could perform well by employing a $k$NN extension that has access to a higher-quality datastore. In this work, we ask whether this improved ability to recall information really translates into downstream abilities. We extensively evaluate $k$NN-LMs on a diverse set of tasks, ranging from sentiment classification and commonsense reasoning to multi-hop reasoning. Results show that $k$NN-LMs excel at memory-intensive tasks, where utilizing the patterns in the input is sufficient for determining the output, but struggle with reasoning tasks that require integrating multiple pieces of information to derive new knowledge. We further demonstrate through oracle experiments and qualitative analysis that even with perfect retrieval, $k$NN-LMs still fail to determine the correct answers, placing an upper bound on their reasoning performance. Code and datastores are released at https://github.com/GSYfate/knnlm-limits/.
We propose an empirical approach centered on the spectral dynamics of weights -- the behavior of singular values and vectors during optimization -- to unify and clarify several phenomena in deep learning. We identify a consistent bias in optimization across various experiments, from small-scale ``grokking'' to large-scale tasks like image classification with ConvNets, image generation with UNets, speech recognition with LSTMs, and language modeling with Transformers. We also demonstrate that weight decay enhances this bias beyond its role as a norm regularizer, even in practical systems. Moreover, we show that these spectral dynamics distinguish memorizing networks from generalizing ones, offering a novel perspective on this longstanding conundrum. Additionally, we leverage spectral dynamics to explore the emergence of well-performing sparse subnetworks (lottery tickets) and the structure of the loss surface through linear mode connectivity. Our findings suggest that spectral dynamics provide a coherent framework to better understand the behavior of neural networks across diverse settings.